Who’s The Most Comic Accurate Live-Action Spider-Man?

[chicago_bastard]

If we judge the performances of the actors I have to go with the unpopular opinion and say Holland. Story choices and supporting cast aside (because these things are not in the actor's responsibility) he comes closest to how I imagine Spidey, from his delivery of the quips to the accent.

[Frontier]

If we judge the performances of the actors I have to go with the unpopular opinion and say Holland. Story choices and supporting cast aside (because these things are not in the actor's responsibility) he comes closest to how I imagine Spidey, from his delivery of the quips to the accent.

I think he's got Peter's voice down but he quips so little that I can hardly really picture his Spidey voice.

Like "Hey, you're not the Avengers!" and the "this defies the laws of physics!" but they write him like that so little it just doesn't stand out as much.

[chicago_bastard]

I think he's got Peter's voice down but he quips so little that I can hardly really picture his Spidey voice.

Like "Hey, you're not the Avengers!" and the "this defies the laws of physics!" but they write him like that so little it just doesn't stand out as much.

Was he really more quippy in the other movies though? It's been a while since I've seen them but when I saw Civil War for the first time I had the feeling that he made more quips in his five minutes of screen time than in the total runtime of his prior solo movies. Falcon was even calling him out on it.

His pop-cultural references are also a plus for me.

[Kaitou D. Kid]

He was generally more quippy in Civil War and Homecoming. He was probably the quippiest in Homecoming, though.

MCU Spider-Man does seem to change his personality a bit based on what role in the film he has to play.

[Kevinroc]

An issue is that almost everyone in the MCU is quippy. Peter doesn't really stand out on that front anymore.

[Kaitou D. Kid]

An issue is that almost everyone in the MCU is quippy. Peter doesn't really stand out on that front anymore.

I do think some characters are significantly quippier than others. For example, Tony Stark was significantly quippier than the rest of the main Avengers. So proportionately to the other characters, Spider-Man should be the same, but he oddly plays the straight man to Stark, Fury, Strange, Mysterio, and Happy in many situations.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

It depends on what we mean by quips. Holland Spidey is generally Aw-jeez and live-tweeting in his dialogue and comments. Whereas Spider-Man when he quips actually often gives out insults to his opponents which Holland Spidey is generally too good-natured to do.

The Avengers-Mask wearing thugs start out as him making fun of them is closest to the latter kind, but aside from that it's too rare. The decision to frame Mysterio as a Stark-Replacement-Daddy likewise mans that Spider-Man doesn't get to make fun of the guy for his fishbowl helmet and then when the shoe drops he's built up as too evil to make fun off. Likewise, they made Vulture look too scary and played him too serious to have Spider-Man joke against him.

Andrew Garfield's Spider-Man is closest to Spider-Man the insult artist (in the early scenes of TASM-1) but again he's too personally invested in his villains like The Lizard, Electro, Harry Goblin for him to make fun of them. Other times he's way too sentimental (his scenes with kids who he rescues and so on, especially that schmaltzy bit in TASM-1 where he makes a scared kid wear his mask to save him). That's one of the problems with the movies diminishing the secret identity and tying the villains closely to the hero's personal life because then Spider-Man can't treat these bad guys like bad guys, instead he talks to them like they're guys he knows.

Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 1 at least until the Thanksgiving scene gives us a more classic distillation. In the first three fight scenes between Spider-Man and Goblin when neither know each other you have Spider-Man calling him "Gobby" and so on. Whereas in Spider-Man 2, Ock is Peter's mentor pre-transformation so Spider-Man going on to insult him in battle like he did in the comics would be odd to do dramatically. In the third film, Sandman is introduced as (sigh) the real guy who killed Ben, and then you have Harry Goblin, and then Brock/Venom who are also known to Peter before he faces them as supervillains.

Ultimately when we talk about accuracy of Spider-Man it really depends on what we mean...if we mean by humor, by quips, and so on [And even then the kind of humor is an issue]. Spider-Man is a composite of different genres (comedy, drama, romance, action, adventure, science-fiction, horror). When I say composite I mean it's able to be multiple genres at once and not have some scenes that are "comedy scenes" followed by x, y and z. In my opinion the only movie that gets the most comprehensive spectrum is SM-1. Everything after that, Raimi's own sequels included, strayed further and further away.

[Frontier]

MCU Spider-Man babbles more than he quips in my opinion.

[Speed Force League Unlimited]

An issue is that almost everyone in the MCU is quippy. Peter doesn't really stand out on that front anymore.

MCU Spider-Man babbles more than he quips in my opinion.

Neither one of you is wrong, that's for sure.

[Kaitou D. Kid]

I think a problem with answering the question is how it's often framed.

1. People tend to talk about Peter Parker as if he's separate from Spider-Man. They'll say something like "Tobey was a better Peter Parker, but Andrew was a better Spider-Man." I don't know if that makes much sense because Peter doesn't put on a fake personality when he's Spider-Man the way Batman pretends to be Bruce Wayne or Superman pretends to be Clark Kent. Spider-Man is just Peter's best self coming out.

2. Peter Parker isn't a static character, so which Peter Parker are we talking about? The shy nerd that he was before the spider-bite? The James Dean-looking average guy that he became in college? The high school teacher who was a fully mature adult? The actor to best nail "Peter Parker", if we can even separate him from Spider-Man in the first place, depends on what point in Peter's life you compare him to.

I'm currently rewatching all the films in preparation for No Way Home. I'm hoping to come back to this thread after that, but I'll try my best to ignore the framing I pointed out above.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

Peter Parker isn't a static character, so which Peter Parker are we talking about? The shy nerd that he was before the spider-bite? The James Dean-looking average guy that he became in college? The high school teacher who was a fully mature adult? The actor to best nail "Peter Parker", if we can even separate him from Spider-Man in the first place, depends on what point in Peter's life you compare him to.

Exactly. [By the way is "James Dean-looking average guy" meant to be semi-sarcastic because average guys don't look like James Dean you know, then and now].

The best way to describe Peter Parker is someone who starts out like Sal Mineo in Rebel without the cause but after getting bit by the spider, he becomes James Dean. And you need an actor who can convey that transformation and so far none of the live-action actors have been able to do that. In theory, the right actor who can do that might have been Tom Hanks from the 1980s (who is Ron Frenz' pick for 'Greatest Peter that never was') an actor who can be dramatic, comedic, romantic, who has an innate likable quality but who can also project a neurotic energy (I recently saw the underrtated '80s film with Hanks called PUNCHLINE, it's quite good). But there's never been another actor like Tom Hanks who can have those registers. Ryan Reynolds around the time he made Definitely Maybe comes close, and Reynolds looks quite a lot like JRJR's Peter from JMS' run.

Fundamentally comics characters were never meant to be played by actors in live-action. Sure a lot of comics characters draw inspirations from actors here and there but the characters on page in full are too unreal to be fully embodied in live-action. There are only two accurate comics castings in film history : Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl in Robert Altman's POPEYE and Simmons as Jonah. That's it. Those are cases where you find actors, who don't have conventional features who have the vocal and physical as well as facial mannerisms to embody the comics' characters. Everything else is some kind of compromise here and there.

[Kaitou D. Kid]

Exactly. [By the way is "James Dean-looking average guy" meant to be semi-sarcastic because average guys don't look like James Dean you know, then and now].

Oops, I meant average in personality. By that point he doesn't have any more trouble socially and in talking to women than your average guy at that age. He does dress and look exceptionally though, like James Dean.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

Oops, I meant average in personality. By that point he doesn't have any more trouble socially and in talking to women than your average guy at that age. He does dress and look exceptionally though, like James Dean.

Yeah.



EB20050619REVIEWS08506190301AR.jpg

[bat39]

Going purely by performance and characterization, I'd say Andrew Garfield comes closer than the other two.

Tobey is a bit too, well...mopey. (Hey, it rhymes!)

Tom I feel really oversells the overexcited teenager/immature novice thing, which frankly has never really been a thing with any previous version of teenage/high-school Spider-Man.

Andrew balances out the witty, sarcastic side of Peter with the angst and the mature-for-his-age aspect. He feels like a bit of a misfit and not one of the popular kids, yet he doesn't come across as a total nerd or wimp.

Frankly, I get the idea that a girl like Gwen would fall in love with Andrew's Peter way more than I get the idea that a girl like MJ would fall in love with Tobey's Peter. It sometimes felt an awful lot like MJ in the Raimi films ended up with Peter mostly because he's the stereotypical ''nice guy next door'' that a girl should settle for after she's had enough of the alpha jocks.

Andrew's Peter also has fun being Spider-Man in a way that Tobey's Peter doesn't...while not getting too geeked out or overexcited about it the way Tom's Peter does.